Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Book review about the Afghanistan war: https://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war
Also included are lawyers imposing hour-long delays before airstrikes could be launched (often the planes had flown away before approval was given) and a Pandora's box full of perverse incentives.
We should've left Afghanistan many years prior to 2021. If the war was a joke in 2009-2012, when the book itself was written, then it was a joke later too. But instead everyone kept passing the parcel onto Biden. My main takeaway is that the Western system is not very good at a timely withdrawal. All this discourse about exit strategies and yet we find it very hard to pull out. It's also basically impossible to correct the error either, no senior figures were punished for the legendary amounts of fraud. Past a certain point the war in its totality can be considered a fraud.
A very sour taste in my mouth now that our cowardly, treacherous, drug-ridden, corrupt, rapey 'allies' from the Afghan Army are being relocated over to Australia, Britain and America, often at considerable expense. The lying still hasn't stopped even after the war was lost.
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